Updates from the edge of the Web

Find Words Smarter with Word Suggestions

In our first Prospector experiment, Speak Words, we helped Firefox learn what words you might want to type into the Awesome Bar. We have taken that idea to help you find words in your open tab in our latest experiment.

Finding a word in Firefox has always been easy because Firefox will move you to the new word formed by your last keystroke. This means you do not need to type out a word then click a search button to try finding a word that you might have misspelled. Firefox will let you know immediately if the new letter you pressed does not form a word that is on the page.

With our newest experiment, Find Suggest, Firefox is even smarter by showing you what words you can find if you were to continue typing. So now you do not even need to make that extra keystroke only to find out that word does not exist in the page.

Additionally, from the list of suggested words, you can click on one of them to have Firefox jump to that word in the page. Not only do you type fewer letters to see if a word might be on the page, you will not need to type the rest of the letters to find the word that you actually want!

In the example above, “ed” matches many times in the page and is the beginning of several words. I was actually trying to find “edward,” and Firefox now immediately informs me that it does exist on the page. But if I were trying to find “edamame,” a simple glance at the list shows me that I will not.

To participate in this experiment as well as keep up to date with other Mozilla Labs experiments, you can install Lab Kit on a Firefox 4 Beta. No restart is necessary to start see Find Suggest take effect. If you just want the add-on by itself, you can get it here.

Ed hacks on all sorts of Content Services projects including Tiles, UP, Interest Dashboard, and Subscribe2Web and previously hacked on Labs projects like Sync, Account Manager and Prospector. He also helps out with neat Firefox features like the Awesome Bar to help users quickly get to what they want. (Or maybe it's that Ed wants to get quickly to news about Mario and Nintendo games, and everyone benefits!)